In August 2019, Salesforce, a leading cloud-based customer relationship management platform, bought Tableau for $15.3 billion.
Tableau is known for its user interface and data visualization capabilities, as well as its ability to pull in data from lots of disparate sources, including on-premises databases.
To some, the Salesforce acquisition of Tableau was all about industry consolidation and customer acquisition — Salesforce CFO Mark Hawkins said that the merger will add between $550 and $600 million to the company’s revenues this year.
“The acquisition was mostly about customer grab,” said Boris Evelson, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “With the exception of Tableau’s on-premise deployment capabilities, technologies overlap nearly 100%.”